VOX  CEPR Policy Portal

Recent scandals involving some financial benchmarks have shaken the confidence in them. Regulators have responded with sanctions and with actions to support more robust benchmarks. This column presents new research on how a benchmark administrator would optimally weigh transaction prices to produce a fixing. Weights assigned to the observed prices should be increasing in the size of the transactions. However, in this setting, it is typically impossible to implement a benchmark in a complete absence of manipulation.